Operator: Our next question will come from Arjun Bhatia with William Blair.
Unidentified Analyst: This is Chris on for Arjun. I just wanted to get a sense for the early feedback you’ve gotten from customers on the brand repositioning that you went through last quarter earlier this year. What impact is this also having — or what impact does the simplified messaging that you’ve developed having on rep productivity?
Marc Ferrentino: So overall, what’s been really great about the repositioning and sort of the more clear message and the more clear description of the value that we deliver is that it’s opening up a lot of new use cases. All of a sudden, you have customers who are looking at us in a completely different light. We’ve sort of introduced ourselves and explain ourselves in a different way, which allows us to move more laterally across different use cases and even different buying centers inside of the enterprise, which is really, really cool. What we’re seeing, ultimately, though, is a more clear picture and a clear understanding of who Yext is today but also where we’re going. So as our customers are thinking about sort of where we fit in the future, where we fit into new solutions and new areas that we can potentially help them in, they just have a better kind of mental roadmap mental framework for how we fit into that.
And it really is looking at a broad set of services that are available across the Answers platform, being able to leverage it in both internal and external use cases, and we’re seeing that in some of the deals that I talked about earlier. And a lot of the stuff that were being introduced and brought into at prospects that honestly, there are use cases we’ve never really seen in the past, and it’s kind of exciting that we’re now able to participate in those. So overall, pretty exciting.
Mike Walrath: I’ll just add to that, that sitting in the seat again, I actually get to talk to a lot of other people who sit in the seat, and that’s one of the fun parts of this job. And one of the things that since I’ve started talking to other CEOs and C-level executives about their Answers problems. I still as yet have found someone who feels that they don’t — who doesn’t feel that they have some sort of an Answers problem where a customer, a constituent, a prospect is asking a question about their business and getting perfect information every time. And so as Mark referred to, that changes the discussion when you start talking about problems — Answers problems to be solved across a much broader spectrum of companies and the new positioning really helps us get to that conversation a lot faster.
Unidentified Analyst: Yes, that’s all really encouraging to hear. Change gears a little bit. I just wanted to kind of check in on your high level thinking about growth and profitability. I know you’ve touched on this a bit. But on one hand, growth has slowed some in recent quarters but you’ve also made really good progress on driving margin expansion this year. Then on the other hand, recently often big tech have made this a bit more of an attractive hiring environment, especially in R&D and sales and marketing than we’ve seen in the past couple of years. Just want to check your pulse on kind of your approach to hiring going into 2023.
Mike Walrath: So first, thanks for the question. I appreciate the recognition. There’s been a lot of hard work done around getting the business more efficient. And I’ll repeat what I’ve said before. We’re going to execute better because of this work, being smaller and being more — and having less silos and having more — a better organization is going to help us to create better results. You will notice that one of the places where we have certainly not decreased our investment is on the R&D line. And so even as we’ve very carefully brought the business to more efficiency, we’ve been focused on bringing in talent in the product and engineering and R&D roles. And I think we’re starting to see the acceleration of our innovation and we’re super grateful for the teams that are executing that.
And so it’s a balance, right? And as we think — as we look forward to next year, we feel really comfortable that the changes that we’ve made from an overall efficiency standpoint are both sustainable and that we can build upon those changes. And we feel confident that future growth of the business comes from better execution across the go-to-market side of the business. And we’ll be looking to particularly direct ARR as the leading indicator there. And obviously, the overall ARR picture is going to drive revenue growth, as I mentioned before.
